Enzo Marinari

Enzo Marinari is Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at Sapienza, University of Rome.
He has been before at CEA Saclay, at Universita' Tor Vergata (Rome) and at Universita' di Cagliari. and Scientific Director for Physics of BIFI (Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems), Zaragoza, Spain, and Director for Physics of NPAC (Northeast Parallel Architecture Center, Syracuse, NY, USA).
He has been visiting professor at Syracuse University, at Ecole Normale Superieure and at Orsay University in Paris.
His main research interests are focused on Statistical Physics, Quantitative and Systems Biology, Disordered and Complex Systems, Numerical Simulations and Algorithms, Parallel Computers.

 

 

 

 

Many microbial systems are known to actively reshape their proteome in response to changes in growth conditions induced e.g. by nutritional stress or antibiotics. Part of the re-allocation accounts for the fact that, as the growth rate is limited by targeting specific metabolic activities, cells respond by fine-tuning their proteome to invest more resources into the limiting activity (i.e. by synthesizing more proteins devoted to it). However, this is often accompanied by an overall re-organization of metabolism, aimed at improving the growth yield under limitation by re-wiring resource through different pathways. By focusing on E. coli's `acetate switch', we  show that the transition from a predominantly fermentative to a predominantly respirative metabolism in carbon-limited growth results from the trade-off between maximizing the growth yield and minimizing its costs in terms of required the proteome share. In particular, E. coli's metabolic phenotypes appear to be Pareto-optimal for these objective functions over a broad range of dilutions.